With a view to enable farmers to diversity their produce and increase their income in Odisha, the State Government is helping them by supplying better varieties to grow. In this direction an Orchid Cultivation and Breeding Centre and a Tissue Culture Production Facility were inaugurated at Bhubaneswar’s Regional Plan Resource Centre.

These will supply new varieties of orchid and produce banana saplings on a mass-scale for farmers.

The orchid centre has been established with an investment of rupees four crores in collaboration with the Department of Agriculture and it will help the floriculture farmers to gain knowledge about orchids and the new techniques and methods used in the farm to grow them.

The centre will also do research work for creating new varieties of orchid from the existing ones in the country. These will be supplied to the farmers. Apart from this 300 different orchid species and cultivars have been collected for developing new hybrids at the centre.

In the newly opened facility, there are three orchid cultivation chambers in which three varieties of Dendrobium — Earsakul, Singapore White, and Sanan White – are being cultivated using low-cost technology.

The Tissue Culture Production facility which has been established at a cost of rupees three crores has been set up by the Forest Department with support from Centre under the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana. Here five lakh banana saplings will be produced using tissue culture technology.

Both the facilities were inaugurated by Odisha’s Additional Chief Secretary, Forest, Environment and Climate Change Department Mona Sharma in the presence of other officials.